The leitmotiv is the following text by Marc Amstutz that he has edited specially for this occasion.

The Salon: Why Theory?

What colour is theory? – it’s a question you often meet. We raise it here not so as to try and find what is anyway an impossible answer. We are really interested in the associations the question evokes. Goethe‘s famous phrase, “All theory, dear friend, is grey, but the golden tree of life springs ever green”, expresses a widely held view of theory – not as an illuminating explicative element, but a dark, obscuring one. To put it another way, what makes life really colourful is not something that theory can encompass.
This view of theory is one that deserves to be opposed (and this is precisely what “The Salon” aims to do in the interdisciplinary field of the humanities and social sciences). Theory ultimately means: questioning one’s own assumptions about the object of one’s reflections. Unlike its origins in ancient Greek (theôreîn: to observe, regard, look), our view is that theory does not consist in the observation of things through pure thought independently of its practical application.
Instead, we see theory as social action: as social action consisting of the formation of social reality. So we follow Luhmann, who ascribes to theory the function of “dis-covering” the environment in which we act: “Theories arrive at their own unity and differentiation not through the way in which the external environment is divided up. It is not the object that guarantees the unity of the theory but the theory that ensures the unity of the object…. An external environment does of course exist, but the form of the unity and differentiation that it presents is due to …. [theoretical] construction”). It is only through theory that it becomes possible to encompass through words what we do, what we make and who we are (or also what we are not). And that means: the manner in which we organize our knowledge – and ultimately our society.
This is not to argue for a dominance of theory over practice. On the contrary, the relationship of theory to practice is one of “constructive distance“: “In order to avoid a mere parallelism, it is necessary for there to be an act of interference, which accepts the other both as something other and yet also as not” (Schandl). Theory is intended to achieve precisely this: to intervene or “interfere” in practice and to do so with the aim of allowing contradiction to become fruitful. It is very much in this sense that Adorno wrote in his “Negative Dialectic”: “The call for a unity of theory and practice has increasingly demoted theory to the status of handmaiden and deprived it of the very thing that it ought to have contributed to that unity. The practical identifying mark that was being demanded of all theory has also became a stamp of censorship. But through the fact that in the famous duality of theory and practice, theory has become the subservient element, it has also lost all definition and became a part of the very politics from which it was intended to find a way out: it was at the mercy of power. The annihilation of theory through dogmatizing and a prohibition on thinking contributed to bad practice; it is in the interest of practice itself that theory regains its autonomy”.
“The Salon” is taking on that challenge: of “interfering” in practice through theorizing so as to allow theory to regain its autonomy. That this is an opportune moment to do so is due not least to the fact that there is a palpable deficit of theory in Switzerland. “Muddling through” seems to have become the order of the day not just in political and economic life, but also in the humanities and social sciences, which have been surprisingly quiet in recent years (you only have to look at the SNF annual report for 2003: 82% of the grants made went to biology, medicine, mathematics, science and engineering; 18% went to the humanities and social sciences!) By observing, debating and putting into a “practical” context the recent and the most current directions that theory is attempting to pursue, the aim is to make a contribution towards (re-) making theory in Switzerland into something that is colourful, dynamic, “multicoloured” and, most of all, which engages in “constructive dissent“. (7.7.04)

Organisation:

Each participant takes it in turns to suggest books or texts to be read and sees to it that they are distributed in time.
Those taking part in the debates meet four times a year in The Salon. We maintain an interdisciplinary discussion and an exchange about our respective activities. In line with a given period of preparation we will always discuss one book or text and will hold the discussion in assigned roles. We then continue the discussion over drinks and dinner. This is also an opportunity to talk about our current activities and answer questions from others about our personal and working lives.

Curtis J. Millhaupt and Katharina Pistor, Law & Capitalism, What corporate crises reveal about legal systems and economic development around the world, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2008, 269 pages

Curtis J. Millhaupt and Katharina Pistor, Law & Capitalism, What corporate crises reveal about legal systems and economic development around the world, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2008, 269 pages

Jeremy Rifkin, The Third Insdustrial Revolution, How lateral power is transforming energy, the economy, and the world, Palgrave Macmillan – a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, New York, 2011, 291 pages